“THIS thing has taken on a life of its own,” Bill Laurance tells me over a glitchy Skype connection from a fieldwork site in Borneo. I’m not surprised, but I don’t say anything. What do you expect when you’re one of the world’s most respected conservation biologists, and you suddenly announce that you’re going in search of thylacines?

Laurance is not averse to publicity, but he is not one for stunts. A professor at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, his day job is to document the wanton destruction of the natural world by hunting, logging, climate change and the rest. “I’m repeatedly accused of being a depressing speaker because of the topics I talk about – habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and all that stuff,” he says. But sometimes something falls into your lap that you just can’t resist. For Laurance, an American living in Australia, it turns out to be the Tasmanian tiger.

Once the world’s largest marsupial predator, thylacines have long exerted a strong tug on the imagination – and the conscience. They lived all over Australia until about 4000 years ago, when they were wiped off the mainland, probably as a result of competition from newly arrived dingoes. They persisted on Tasmania, but the last known animal died in a zoo in Hobart in 1936, just 59 days after the Tasmanian government passed legal protection to halt an extinction for which it was largely responsible. For the previous 100 years, European settlers had subjected thylacines to remorseless persecution. With a government bounty on offer, sheep farmers shot, trapped and poisoned the animals in their thousands. The last wild thylacine was shot dead in 1930.

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But sightings continued across Australia. Almost all have been dismissed as hoaxes or cases of mistaken identity: foxes, dingoes, feral pigs or even the rear ends of wallabies. But a few are less easy to discount.

One of those sightings was made by Brian Hobbs, a tourism operator and experienced bushman from Queensland. One night in 1983, while camping on the Cape York peninsula in the state’s far north, he twice saw a group of four dog-like animals with thick tails, short hair and stripes on their sides. “I’d never seen anything like them before, ever,” he later said.

Hobbs kept it to himself for 34 years. But earlier this year, prompted by a report on his local radio station about the possibility of de-extincting thylacines, he contacted the station. They recorded an interview in which he offered to reveal the location to anyone serious who wanted to investigate.

Which is where Laurance enters the story. As a frequent voice on the station, he was asked to comment on Hobbs’s account. “After hearing it I thought, huh… and so I phoned him. I didn’t lead him at all; I just tried to get him to tell me what he had seen. I kept asking open-ended questions – describe this, describe this. It’s a very plausible observation. Of course, he could have seen pictures of thylacines and internalised them, and it was in the 1980s, which counts against him. But he said he sat on it because he didn’t want to be seen as a kook.”

One key detail was the eyes. If you shine a torch on an animal’s face at night, the colour and shape of the reflected “eyeshine” is usually enough for an experienced zoologist to identify the species. Hobbs described the eyes as shining red. “That’s not common,” says Laurance. “On that basis, we’re able to discount dingoes, dogs and feral pigs. Those were the things we really wanted to rule out. Foxes don’t occur up there because it’s too warm.”

A second witness soon came forward with a detailed description of a sighting in the same – undisclosed – area, around the same time. “He said he saw it quite clearly, in bright moonlight and at close range, including the stripes. This guy is a really serious park ranger, a long-time employee of the Queensland national parks service. So we had two credible observers, with stuff you can’t make up.”

“I asked, somewhat tongue in cheek, whether anybody wanted to incorporate a search for the thylacine into their work.” His colleague Sandra Abell put her hand up. The university issued a press release announcing the search, and after that, says Laurance, “it went batshit”.

Not being all that familiar with thylacines, I decided to look one up. The Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London has three specimens, including the complete skeleton of an immature female. It is about the size and shape of a whippet. The museum also has a mature male skull that suggests a full-grown thylacine would be substantially bigger.

Are thylacines still out there?

Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images

I asked museum manager and Australian mammals expert Jack Ashby whether it was credible for a predator that size to live undetected on Cape York. He weighed his answer carefully. “It’s not impossible. It’s not particularly well-explored and there aren’t many roads. Sightings are usually easy to dismiss, but the only ones I’ve ever thought sound slightly different are from Cape York. I’m not saying I think there are thylacines, but it’s the only place where I’d say… maybe.”

And for Laurance, maybe is enough. “We don’t actually think there’s a strong probability that thylacines still exist on Cape York, but it would be errant not to at least explore the possibility,” he says.

And so Abell and her team are preparing to set 50 camera traps in the region of the sightings, 1 to 2 kilometres apart, baited with a scent known to be attractive to predators. Every couple of weeks they’ll check the cameras, download the data – and hope. By the time the rainy season returns in November and makes the cape impassable, it is possible that the thylacine will be back from the dead.

Well, maybe. “We regard this as a remote possibility, 1 to 2 per cent. But there are many cases where rare species persist in remote places. Shy wildlife in small numbers can be very, very hard to see,” Laurance says.

“There are many cases where rare species persist in remote places”

But is it really worth it? Most people who search for thylacines are regarded as cranks. I put it to Laurance that he’s taking a huge risk. All that hard scientific work, all that effort arguing for conservation policies… could he end up being discredited as that guy who searches for Tassie tigers?

Laurance points out that he has been defending the mainstream end of cryptobiology for many years, not least because it pays off. Numerous “Lazarus” species have been rediscovered in recent years, including the Javan elephant, Cuban solenodon and terror skink.

But he nonetheless acknowledges the risk. “I’ve been trying to damp down some of the wilder speculation, and I’m hoping my scientific reputation will be intact by the time it has finished. I don’t need an asterisk attached to my name saying ‘partly unhinged’.

“But it’s not the Loch Ness monster. It’s not the yeti. Those are over on the other side. This is a creature that definitely occurred in this area and disappeared. If we get evidence – and that’s a gigantic if – it would be a real sign of hope. And that’s very important in the world we live in.”

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Bill Laurance is distinguished research professor at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia